This page attempts to catalog all known prints in Yoshitoshi‘s series ‘Tōkyō ryōri sukoburu beppin (東亰 料理 頗 別品 – Beautiful Women and Fancy Dishes in Tōkyō)’.
The title is given a wide range of translations, depending on how literal – and discreet – the translator wishes to be; in the original Japanese it seems to have a number of potential double meanings which are difficult to capture in English. ryōri means ‘food’, ‘dish’, ‘management’ etc.; sukoburu means ‘extremely’, and beppin is a somewhat vulgar word meaning ‘beautiful woman’. So one plausible translation is ‘beautiful women and fancy dishes of Tōkyō’.
The title of each individual print is in the cartouche to the left of the series title cartouche; the location is given at the top, and the establishment at the bottom.
The series dates from the middle of Yoshitoshi’s career, when he was about thirty-two. It thus dates from about fourteen years before his well-known masterpieces such as his great series “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” (1885-1892), and “New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts” (often called simply “Thirty-Six Ghosts”) (1889-1892).
The prints in this series are collaborations between Yoshitoshi and various of his students, including:
- Toshihide
- Toshikage
- Toshimaro
- Toshinobu
- Toshitsugu
- Toshikazu
Technical details
- Dates: 9/1871
- Size: Ōban
- Signed:
- Seals: Unread
- Publishers:
- Block carvers:
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has two almost-complete sets of this series. One (Accession Number 11.37704, etc) seems to be a different edition from the other (Accession Number 11.39818, etc); the former, which is printed in brighter colours (in some cases, slightly garish) appears to be the earlier.
Judging by the printers’ seals, they seem to have been printed by different publishers, although the publisher of the supposed second edition has not yet been identified.
Previous cataloguings
The only known attempts to enumerate this series was in Keyes’ thesis:
Roger. S. Keyes, "Courage and Silence: A Study of the Life and Color Woodblock Prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892", Cinncinnati, 1982
where it appears as series #274.
Keyes listed 17 prints in this series, but we have found an additional 2 prints, which we have numbered in the order in which they were discovered (approximately).
This page (and list) is not necessarily complete; the series is not well documented, and there may be yet other prints which have not yet come to our attention. If you know of any prints from this series which aren’t listed here, or have either i) information about any errors on the page, ii) better images than the ones below, or iii) missing information about individual prints (e.g. publisher, exact date) please let us know.
